


Ten Small Steps for a Wizard

by starghost



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Harry Potter Next Generation, M/M, Space Flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 12:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6328063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starghost/pseuds/starghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There isn't any reason why a wizard <i>shouldn't</i> go to the moon, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Small Steps for a Wizard

There once was a three-year-old boy who looked up at the moon through his nursery window, a moon so bright and shining and close that he reached up to grab it. He was so focused on the moon, that big brilliant marble in the sky, that he didn't notice his hand turn silver, or his hair.

Having heard a toy topple after bedtime when no toys should be toppling, his grandmother opened the door to see a ghost.

A silver ghost in green frog pajamas.

Tucked back in bed, his hair once again the jet black he'd been favoring ever since his godfather made all his toys dance at once (at once! all of them!), Teddy Lupin turned his face to the window and decided that more than ice cream or dancing toys or his own wand, he wanted to touch the moon.

#

"I don't see why you'd bother," Victoire says, exasperated, and that was why they'd broken up before she'd finished school.

As family dinner tapers off in other rooms, he and Victoire are hiding in the library. Well, Teddy _was_ hiding, until Victoire found him, legs dangling over the arm of a chair while he drew light pictures on the ceiling.

It's a few days after Christmas and Teddy is starting to vibrate inside from the sheer number of people he's been charming, between the Tonkses and the ever-growing Weasleys (and honoraries, like Teddy).

Victoire is visiting while Beauxbatons is closed and she can neither teach nor work. Beauxbatons was very serious about their holidays, closing the school grounds entirely, which possibly is what's putting Victoire in such a contrary mood. Probably longing for her calculator and cello so she can continue her attempts to create a new music-based form of Arithmancy.

That was also why they were doomed. He was tone-deaf; she was a homebody. They were star-crossed from the start.

"Why wouldn't you want to go to the moon?" Teddy asks.

"How would you even do it?"

"I don't know, but why not try?"

"Honestly, what does the moon even have? Rocks and dust. You know how I know that? The muggles went there, came back, and told everyone. So why do _you_ need to go?"

"Great, Vee, let's just kick back and do nothing ever again, since the muggles seem to have it under control. Who needs a Patronus when you have Xanax? Forget Lumos — just get out your damn iPhone. Floo Powder? Antiquated in this age of Skype and monorails and jets. What are we, history? Merlin's —"

"I'm just _say_ ing that it seems a lot of fuss for something so stupid."

Teddy realizes what he's about to say isn't the most mature or intelligent response, and he's usually much nicer and more patient, but he's tired and has had a glass or three of firewhisky and doesn't really want to be arguing about something he's been fixated on for years and years, so he says it anyway: " _You're_ stupid."

Victoire rolls her eyes.

"I hope you get over this before it's too late," she says, stealing his glass.

For some reason he can't tear his eyes away while she takes a long sip, which isn't that much of a mystery; she's still beautiful and neither of them are completely over the other even though they're long since over. She leaves a lipstick print on the glass.

In the doorway, Victoire pauses. "I don't want you ending up running the _Quibbler_ or something."

"The moon is _real!"_ he shouts after her.

Teddy didn't think that was something he'd ever have to say.

#

Teddy hadn't set out to become anything in particular. He was a good student. Cheerful. Studious. Top marks, Head Boy. Tried his hand at Quidditch and failed spectacularly. For about three months he joined the Giant Squid Friendship Society, but that was mostly because they said they went underwater all the time and he thought it would be interesting.

They did not. And were not.

His grandmother thought he might become a traveling writer. His godfather hoped he'd be an Auror for some reason, though Teddy had never shown interest in any part of the job. Aunt Hermione said he was probably clever enough to work in the Ministry, and if he wanted she could put in a good word for him.

It's dull, being an assistant to an undersecretary of something or other in a quiet corner of the Department of Magical Transportation. But Teddy kind of likes dull, likes his mind wandering as he sorts through applications for portkeys and cross-checks complaints about the Floo network against known issues.

At lunch Teddy talks, or takes walks, or reads.

"What're you reading today?" Rhys asks whenever they run into each other in the caf. Teddy holds up a book, or a paper, or shrugs. When he shrugs, the weather's usually nice. When he shrugs, he knows they're going to go for a walk. They walk among the muggles like they're all part of the same city and no one knows anything about spells.

Rhys is so charming and full of his own thoughts that Teddy doesn't mention the moon until they've already been dating for two months.

What happened is startling but not surprising: Lunchtime walks become drinks after work become hey-why-don't-you-come-along-with-my-friends-and-I become walking him home on a cool foggy night even though neither of them is _really_ too pissed to Apparate or flag down a taxi. It's late. Teddy's wide awake. Too aware of what he wants, and how close _this_ want is.

Under a streetlight, Teddy straightens Rhys's lapel, his fingers slow. Still talking, small words on the quiet street. Rhys tilts his head a degree, or maybe he doesn't. Either way, Teddy lets his hands tighten, pulling Rhys an inch closer, tilting forward himself, and kisses him.

Rhys laughs after, but a rare quiet one. A chuckle, breath hot on Teddy's cheek.

They're doomed, too. After Cahokia and Johannesburg and Phnom Penh, after the midnight theories of why British wizards stopped exploring, after three years of changing his hair to match Rhys's tie but never mentioning what he was doing, they were still doomed.

"You always look at me like I'm never coming back," Rhys says, a few weeks before the thing that was 'them' collapses into dust and memory. Like Teddy knows what he means.

Some months after, Teddy gets a promotion that takes him deeper into the world of portkeys and has him working through a lot of lunches. Rhys takes an assignment in Morocco, and never comes back. At least neither of them have to pretend it's not unbearable to see the other in the caf.

#

Space travel is very complicated, so Teddy has a notebook. Aunt Hermione had shown him a trick that extends a notebook by ten without bulking up the spine or weight, and thank goodness, because after Rhys leaves, Teddy starts researching in earnest, with cross-references and sticky notes, and it's very convenient to have it all in one place.

He starts to think that muggles were mad to attempt the thing at all. First there's getting off the Earth — well, defeating gravity isn't much of a challenge, so _that_ isn't so much the problem as the distance. And an anchor. A shocking amount of magic assumes a proximity to certain elements, or perhaps the planet, but some intimidatingly dense texts talk about the changing qualities of magic at different altitudes, distances from land, distances from one's home... It's staggering. Teddy scrawls away. He develops a theory. Way-stations, he thinks. But that only makes him wonder how to put magical way-stations in orbit around Earth, _and_ keep track of them.

One day he stumbles across a photograph of the team that put the first muggle on the moon, and he is immensely jealous of the number of people in the photograph.

He pastes it in his notebook.

Oxygen and pressure are a problem, obviously. It's not as simple as he thought; the bubbles that allow you to breathe underwater still draw oxygen from the water itself. And for whatever reason, wizards who have attempted to see the bottom of the ocean have never returned. Not a one. Not that many have tried, so maybe it has nothing to do with the pressure difference being unbearable. Maybe each person fell in love with a merperson.

Sometimes space travel seems prohibitively complicated.

#

It's a hobby.

It's not a hobby, it's an obsession.

It's not an obsession, it's a professional goal.

Teddy sighs a lot, and lays his head down on his desk a lot. He does his work, goes home. Attends family dinners, goes back to his tiny flat in London. Sets up an unregistered portkey to go to Iceland, Apparates back to London, goes back to his minuscule, messy flat with the worst headache of his life.

Portkeys, he decides, are a more likely avenue than Apparition. He doesn't try again for years, but starts writing about the theory of every type of magical transportation, digging through the archives at work for additional notes that no one else has bothered to access. Quite by accident, he authors a book that every sixth year student at Hogwarts is forced to pretend to read.

#

"I'm going to head a new Department of Magical Aerospace Research and take the first wizards into space in our lifetimes with the goal of at least the moon at first then maybe farther with any luck and the Ministry is announcing it on Monday but I wanted to tell you all myself."

A stunned silence follows Teddy's breathless announcement. Victoire, tiny little Luc in her arms, only shakes her head. Her husband Ethan furrows his brow and waits. He's very quiet, Ethan, which Teddy appreciated from the first moment they stood in silence together.

"The moon? But _why?"_ That's Uncle Ron. Sounding as flabbergasted as he did when, well, almost anything happened.

"Because it's there, I think," Victoire says, sounding weary. That could've been the baby's fault, though. Not necessarily Teddy.

"No one said anything to me about it." Harry sounds a little put-out, but then he grins. "Sounds wicked. Congrats!"

Aunt Hermione, she already knew of course, and she's mostly focused on stealing Ron's pudding while he's distracted. Ginny, she's missing, she's been missing a lot, or maybe Teddy has. It's hard to say. It's been a while since she's sat down with him and an instant camera, getting him to model the exact color she wants for her hair next.

The others are fairly excited, once the shock wears off. Yes, Hugo says the same thing Victoire once did, which is "But the muggles already — " but thankfully Rose elbows him hard. James says something about Quidditch on the moon, which Albus runs with, and then they wander off into their own sub-conversation.

It's Gran that worries Teddy.

Gran only looks at him through all of this.

After they're in the car, almost back to Gran's flat, she clasps her hands in her lap and says, "What is this about?"

He stops the car in the narrow street, Gran's bright blue door in sight. The moon is somewhere behind a building, and Gran is gazing at him with concern. Maybe he's not that clever, because he has no idea what she means. He's the head of the first new department in years and years. Hardly a cause for distress.

"Can't you be excited?" Teddy runs his hands through his hair.

"Later, once I'm sure you haven't gone 'round the bend. Is this about your father?"

Perplexed, Teddy shakes his head, but unease shivers through him.

"The moon, sweet pea? Sure you don't want to cure lycanthropy or figure out how to talk to the dead?"

It takes an enormous amount of willpower for Teddy to smile calmly, tell his grandmother that he simply likes exploration and this new movement in the wizarding community of looking forward instead of back (all these things he'd said in the weeks of meetings about the new department). He kisses her cheek and watches her latch her door before driving off, and he's so focused on breathing like a normal person and driving and signaling and struggling into the tiny parking spot that he utterly forgets all the charms and spells added to his car that would've let him avoid parking entirely. Teddy is far, far too focused on making it up to his flat, where he closes the curtains tight before curling up in a ball on top of his duvet.

A part of Teddy has always been quietly, seethingly angry about his dad, but that part is so constant and so far in the background that it hardly ever makes it to the surface these days. Oh, he's angry about Mum too, of course, but Mum, her life was different. Teddy has every detail, down to the color of her hair when she first left for Hogwarts. The shape of her nose when Teddy was born.

Dad, though. Teddy is angriest about how little anyone could tell him. Most of the people who'd known Dad — _really_ known him — are long dead, too. Sirius. Harry's parents. Dumbledore. Even Snape.

Everyone around Teddy remembers those last couple years. He's heard how Dad lit up like the sun when Teddy was born. Gran has piles of photos of Mum and Dad with Teddy in that single month their lives all overlapped. Photos where Dad's too busy watching Teddy sleep to pay attention to the camera, or one where Teddy sleeps while his parents pore over a map. The last photo, a few days before the final battle, where Mum's asleep on Dad's shoulder. That one, Dad looks at the camera a lot. That one, Teddy stole from the box.

All those years before that, all that person that Dad was, Teddy only gets stories of stories, the ghosts of a life that gave him life, and it's so unfair that Teddy can't even think about it most of the time.

It never, ever occurred to Teddy that Dad had his own relationship with the moon.

#

The moon is high and full in the night sky. There are trees and rolling hills, a cabin with a winding path, owls and crickets and things that aren't quite like home, but the same moon as ever shines down. Hand in hand with Mim, Teddy walks in silence. They promised, no talking about work after sunset.

The first day it had been "after dinner" but they cheated and skipped dinner to keep talking about how much they'd improved the experience and accuracy of portkeys already. A new record. Not good enough. Not even close. But it was more than anyone had done since the invention of the damned thing.

They had landed in the middle of Ohio, to the sound of delighted cheers and clapping from the Americans waiting for them. When they realized it had worked, Mim kissed Teddy so hard he stumbled backward. So hard he forgot there were people around. So hard that when they parted, he blinked and asked, "Where are we?"

More than a few Ohioans laughed at him.

It'll take some time to figure out the next step. The farthest anyone can go on Earth is the diameter, and you have to choose the right spots for that. Or a very accurate boat. But they have to hit that fraction of the distance first, before they figure out how to start going up. Only 13,000 kilometers across; almost 400,000 to the moon.

Teddy has ideas, and Mim has ideas, but right now it's after sunset and they're in rural, foresty Ohio and an owl is hooting while their boots crunch through autumn leaves.

It's not that they're silent because all they can talk about is work. Teddy squeezes Mim's hand. It feels like a place to be quiet, just now. He looks at her, the scarf wrapped around her neck and the way her dark curls spring from under her headband, the rosy shimmer to the lipstick she's wearing. He looks at their hands swinging, her dark fingers peeking between his. He looks at her eyes which are happy and dark and strangely secretive, and then he realizes they've stopped walking.

Three more days before they set up the portkey home, in part because the rest of the department said if Teddy and Mim didn't go on a vacation, they'd quit. Teddy, it turns out, is quite happy to be on vacation, in the States, with Mim.

"Why did it take so long to meet you?" he asks, bumping his forehead against hers.

"Some orbits only align once in a lifetime." Every time Mim makes a casual, silly reference to space, the left corner of her mouth turns up. Teddy kisses it.

"More like two orbits ran into each other, completely changing both paths."

"Celestial bodies colliding, creating something new?"

"Earth and moon, now stuck together."

"Moonbaby," Mim says, and it lands bittersweet in his ears. He winces; she squeezes his hands. "It's not a bad thing."

"I don't want to be the man who went to the moon because he has unresolved father issues. The idea that my brain concocted this obsession without my —"

"Oh, Teddy," Mim says. "Name one great thing that wasn't done, on some level, because of parents."

His mind blanks, and he digs deeper, frowns in thought, until Mim speaks again.

"I know how badly you want this, and I do too. I don't know why. And I don't think you really know either. It's enough that it's there and it's the next thing and I _want to_. I didn't even know I wanted to until you were in the paper saying we would. Thank Merlin, Teddy, thank the sky above and the fount of magic and whatever else you believe in, that you found your way into making the Department of Magical Aerospace Research because I can't imagine a life where I didn't find you two years ago. Even if you gave it up today —"

Teddy startles at the thought, no longer frowning at their clasped hands.

"— I'd still be right here, anyway. At this point I'd go with you to the moon, or I'd go on my own and come back for dinner, so we should decide when to fit a wedding into all this."

"Pardon?" There's a gap there somewhere, some word that Teddy's missed, though he's usually so attentive to Mim.

She taps his nose. "A wedding."

"Are we getting married?" Yes, he's asking the question like he's not sure, but his hands seem pretty sure, cupping Mim's face, and his mouth seems pretty sure, simultaneously kissing her and smiling, and his insides are definitely sure, since it feels like fireworks are being set off in his heart.

#

Briefly, when the Department of Magical Aerospace Research is deep into advanced non-living testing, and considering who or what should be the first live subject to send into the atmosphere, there is a war.

It's confined to South Asia, but every country with a significant wizarding population feels the need to participate. At least in name. So and so aligns with such and such, and soon Teddy is having irrational nightmares that his children are going to go fight, even though they're only four and six years old. He has less irrational nightmares that somehow he'll get pulled into it, him and Mim, and they'll be fighting as hard as they can, even though they're better with theory and charts and meetings; side by side they'll be and then —

In the light of day he knows it's making him think of the stories about the Battle of Hogwarts.

It's fine. The war is short. His nightmares fade.

After, Teddy is called to a meeting. The Minister of Magic reveals that India, in addition to the skirmishes with a dark magic that once again tried and failed to rise to the surface, has started their own movements toward space. The Minister says this like he's telling Teddy that they've banned wands and sunk Sri Lanka into the ocean.

"India, sir?" Teddy says.

"Beat them."

"Sir?"

"It's a matter of pride, Lupin. This is a race now."

"Sir." Teddy's voice goes flat.

"We thought you'd have something more to show for it by now. A lunar goblin, a star doxy..." The Minister sighs back in his chair. "Honestly, we're getting to the point where I'd believe in _The Quibbler's_ moon frogs."

The Minister soon dismisses him and Teddy walks slowly back to his office. Someone brings him a cup of tea, which he glares at. As though they weren't already working as hard as they could. As though sheer willpower could advance magic any faster. The Minister is impossible. _Do it_ , he says.

Teddy sips his tea. Darjeeling. Too sweet. But he does like darj—

Oh, _ob_ viously.

He calls together everyone with any sort of authority in the department, and then some. An old friend who worked in India before the war, Aunt Hermione (officially retired but that's a physical impossibility for her), some friends in the Department for International Magical Cooperation who aren't feeling burned by the war.

Teddy takes a deep breath before entering the room because what in the seventy-two moons of Jupiter was he about to _do?_ But he walks in and catches Aunt Hermione's eye, and that at least gives him the courage to start talking.

"India is trying to figure out how to magic their way into space, and the way I see it is that there are two possibilities," Teddy says, gazing around the room. Astonished murmurs rush through the room, because the whole India-space thing had been kept under wraps until this moment. "We can either do like the Minister wants, and keep our heads down, beat them to the punch..."

Teddy's deputy frowns like he knows exactly how ridiculous that is.

"Or we can give them a ring and see what they've come up with so far. Work together. Because, you know, not everyone is British — regrettably — but that means they look at things differently. And despite what the Minister might think, this? Exploration? Pushing forward? It isn't a competition. We're all humans, with a common string back to the fount of magic, and a common goal in sight. Up. To the stars."

To his surprise, there's a smattering of applause when he finishes.

#

Ten anchors are set to follow the moon in a string, like footholds in a wall. Teddy hopes that some future genius will succeed where he's failed and find a way around that. Decrease the number, or else they'll never get anywhere but the moon. Nothing else is so politely aligned.

Each anchor is a spacekey with a safe area projected around it. Each one should, if the spell is maintained, look a bit like a bus stop. A nice one, with a shelter and a bench and a sign reminded the astromage how many spacekeys are left.

The spells to produce oxygen and heat draw from a new gemstone imbued with immense power while on Earth, and recharged by being outside of Earth's atmosphere, exposed to radiation and solar rays. Luna Lapis. After they were conceived of, it had taken a decade to craft one that worked. Longer than any other single part. The first one that worked got overwhelmed with the power they needed it to hold and burnt out, unusable. As it's too large to be a pendant, it sits on the Lupins' mantle at home.

Evaluations are devised to test the potential astromage's ability to adjust to the spacekey trip and hop forward to the next; to respond to problems without panicking; to come up with solutions on the fly; to maintain a strong connection with their magical abilities. These are all difficult to test on Earth. There are speed tests, back and forth across the globe: Chile to Russia; Peru to Vietnam; Brazil to Indonesia. Stress tests with a dozen people throwing obstacles at you.

But the last, the last is impossible to test. They won't know until they go, if magic is tied to Earth.

They have sent up automatons, smart enough to grab from spacekey to spacekey and return, recording bursts of information. The automatons come back, all the way to and from the moon, dust on their feet and records in their eyes. If they stay animated all that way, then magic must survive.

Mim still worries, and so do the kids, and so does Teddy.

A special set of robes is designed by the team in India to be a personal atmosphere for each astromage, blocking the things that the muggles have stated are deathly to humans in space. With the hood up, gloves and boots on, the astromage can survive. That, and a complex set of spells powered by yet another Luna Lapis to generate a walking radius of air and pressure and moisture and all the little things that make life worth living.

There are a million small details, a million possible problems, a million reasons not to.

They are so, so close.

#

It's quiet.

There isn't any wind, or skittering pixies, or locusts or traffic or chatter from other rooms or settling houses or anything. When Teddy breathes, it sends little eddies around his circle.

As an afterthought, he adds a dark spot above him and charms it to move with the sun and shade his eyes, on top of the filters in the Luna Lapis projection. Aashrita and Will do the same.

"Stay a moment," he says, and walks toward a rise. Each step leaves a small crater, until the edge of his circle passes over and brushes it away. Don't leave a trace. Don't want to confuse the muggles if they come back.

Teddy walks over the rise and skids down the other side. At the bottom he raises his wand, whispers, and turns slowly in a circle.

Nothing. He didn't expect anything but dust, though everyone else in the Ministry had. Still, it'd be nice to have something more to show for all these years. But it's only dust, and a privileged view of home, from very far away.

Teddy sits in the soft dust of the moon and looks up at Earth. It's blue and green and white and brown and perfect, just beautiful, half in shadow and all so very home that it makes him tear up for a second. Merlin, he's getting old and sappy. Next he's going to be reminiscing and wishing he had more time and missing his kids and — shit, no, his breath catches in his throat.

There was a story that Harry told him, from the year his dad taught Harry. The hilarious time with the boggart, all their fears banished over and over. Even the bit about Snape was funny, though when Teddy first heard it, it felt terribly disrespectful, laughing about a man who'd helped save everything. (Except it _was_ funny, the funniest.) Another time Teddy asked what the Boggart had turned into on Harry's turn and Harry explained. Finally, after Teddy had actually faced a Boggart on his own, after he'd wiped his face clean of tears and caught his breath from the laughter, after that, Teddy wrote to Harry, and Harry wrote back, and in the end, the answer was obvious, wasn't it? The moon, the moon, the moon.

With a flick of his wrist, Teddy's wand is pointed at the dust.

"Riddikulus," he whispers. Nothing happens. Dust stirs from his heavy sigh. Teddy presses the heels of his hands against his cheekbones, where there are spots of wetness and a strange pressure.

When he feels calmer, he looks up at Earth again, and heaves himself to standing. Collects a few samples of dust. Returns to his team. Aashrita has her own samples, and Will is surrounded by hovering objects, including a self-writing quill that he's quietly dictating to.

"Sorry about that. Let's keep moving. Only forty minutes left," Teddy says. Dinner's at seven, back in Reading, with all three kids. And Mim's going to want to see some moondust for herself.

#

There is a heated discussion happening in the sitting room between Teddy's two oldest children. Teddy is horrified that it sounds like it could be some sort of fuss, a fête, a post-retirement bit of nonsense, putting him at the center of attention simply for living so long.

"He'll be mortified."

"No! He'll be proud. Love it. He'll probably cry."

"Dad doesn't cry at anything!"

"Ha, shows what you know."

"I still think it's in poor taste."

"No, it's perfect."

Tired of listening from the hallway, Teddy pushes through the door. "What's perfect?"

"We thought of a name for the lunar outpost."

" _She_ did."

Intrigued, Teddy flicks his glasses down from his forehead and stares at the paper his daughter gives him. He presses his fingers to his cheekbone, blinks too much. After a moment, he laughs, and wipes his eyes.

The Remus J. Lupin Center for Aerospace Studies.

"I think it has a nice ring to it," Teddy says.


End file.
